1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to inventory management in a data center and more particularly to locating physical resources in a data center.
2. Description of the Related Art
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. The typical data center generally includes not only a multiplicity of servers, both stand alone and rack mount, but also communication switching devices, redundant or backup power supplies, environmental controls including air conditioning and fire suppression and security devices. Oftentimes, different sets of servers and associated switches are stored in cabinets within the data center or on racks in the data center, with those cabinets or racks organized in rows just as may be the case with bookshelves in a library.
In any data center environment, it is necessary to locate a particular physical hardware device for several reasons—for example, to address a fault or other condition accessible only through direct physical access to the hardware device. However, the location of a hardware device in a datacenter can differ from a specific rack or cabinet number in a particular location, to a slot within a chassis located in a specific rack or cabinet in a particular location. Further, without a specific map of the location of different devices in a data center, merely knowing a device name does not help one locate the device.
One solution is an integrated map of the full data center, mapping specific systems to given slots in a rack. The integrated map, though, must be meticulously updated in order to be successfully used to locate different devices in the data center. As such, if a device is moved, even for a brief period, problems arise. In any event, the requirement to locate a device typically arises when the device is first installed—prior to the updating of an integrated map. Therefore, more advanced technological solutions are required. Current solutions address the complexity of locating individual hardware components in the data center through the utilization of several technologies such as universal product codes (UPC) and radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags. These methods require the personnel to carry a device to read the UPC or RFID values, as they are not generally human-readable. Methods such as RFID also suffer from the problem of having multiple responses to a local read, since many tags will respond to a read action from the user. UPC suffers from the requirement of having to scan each code individually, which requires the personnel to scan multiple systems to find the specific one being sought.
As a more general method of locating elements in the data center without a specific identification tag, visual indicators, such as LEDs may be illuminated to draw attention to components in need of service. Even still, one must be within eye-shot of an illuminated LED to locate a corresponding element and further, once within eye-shot, these lights may be lost in the sea of other status and activity LEDs that are commonly present on the front and back panels of a data center device.